how to restore mac air to original factory settings?

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How have you determined the Recovery volume is missing? And what have you done to the system, I'm sensing you haven't told us the whole story here.

Sorry to sound so terse I'm not feeling well.

I had searched for an answer for more than a week. holding option when i restart helped solve the reseting problem because for some reason my mba wont connect to internet with cmd+R. thank you very much.

My situation differ (Macbook Air Oct 2011) theses were the steps I took:

1) boot with "option" and select Recovery HD

2) Run Disk Utility and deleted the main partition

3) Re-booted and horrified that the Recovery Hd is missing too, in place is the Globe icon and the need to connect to a WPA2 network in order to connect to the Internet.

4) After connecting to the network, waited for about 5 mins before giving me the Error -3400F

5) Called up Apple support, they couldn't find out why and what's the error is about. Was dumb-founded when I was informed that my MacBook Air is the latest shipped with OS X Lion 10.7.2 therefore there is no other alternative to restore it (except via Internet)

6) Desperate me, went to the Authorised Apple Service centre (Singapore does not have an official Apple support/genuis centre)

7) Suprisingly, the service centre network did not give any error but because they will charge me $150 for the download (what the h?), I aborted the download.

8) Went home frustrated and cursing why Apple has to make it so restrictive just to restore the MacBook air !! suddenly an ideal came to my mind..

Solution:

1) took out my faithful old MacBook Black 13" (2007). upgraded it to OS X Lion 10.7.2 (Spend about $80 for the upgrade in total).

2) Used the Recovery Hd, created a bootable USB OS X Lion 10.7.2

3) Plug it into my MacBook Air and woah !! it works !! the MacBook Air detected the USB drive and boot up and MacBook Air and restored it.. ( funny thing here is that when the Download connection does not have any issues when the Recovery Hd is running it.

Finally, a happy man, did it all by myself..

I hope my story here will help someone that faced the same frustration I had.

Hi all,

One simple solution, which nobody seemed to mention...

If all you want to do is securely remove user data, then all this restoring and re-installing the entire OS is really not necessary. Macs have a UNIX architecture after-all, so..

The easiest way by far to remove your data/files securely, is to:

1) Create another user account with admin rights. (All checkboxes under Settings->"Users and Groups")

2) Log out as yourself, and log in as the new admin.

3) Delete your own user account, and select the options to remove the user's data, and check the box for "Secure Erase"

The key to understanding this is to understand UNIX. All the files for a user lives under it's "Home" folder. By securely removing that folder, you remove everything for that user.

Then you might want to remove applications, which were installed outside of the user's account, and things like that, but that's another story. My advice is for people who did not get in under the hood, and modify any Mac OSX folders, but I doubt those people would be reading this post anyway, so we should be good.

Also, one of the biggest things to remember before deleting any user account, or restoring anything to factory settings is to de-activate applications like iTunes, Photoshop, and the likes, which register their license usage on external sites. And of course to copy the entire contents of your "home" folder to a backup drive prior, or make sure time machine has had a clean run. (-: